Use of a group support system for collaborative assessment

Assessment is one of the most important tasks in the whole teaching and learning process. It has major impacts on students' learning approaches and learning outcomes. This paper reports the use of an Internet-based Group Support System (GSS) for the collaborative assessment of student projects. An empirical study was conducted on a 2nd year undergraduate course of Distributed Information Systems. In the experiment, the students were randomly assigned to two groups: an experimental group (with GSS support) and a control group (face-to-face). The results of the empirical study indicate that students participated in the GSS-supported collaborative assessment have a significantly higher level of "deep approach" strategies to learning and better project grades than those in the face-to-face collaborative assessment group. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.